According to Salary.com, the average salary for a Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) is $153,522 per year, and in 2021, more CSOs were hired than in the previous five years combined. Additionally, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will soon begin to “require registrants to include certain climate-related disclosures in their registration statements and periodic reports, including information about climate-related risks that are reasonably likely to have a material impact on their business, results of operations, or financial condition, and certain climate-related financial statement metrics in a note to their audited financial statements.” Furthermore, retailers like Wal-Mart, Target and even REI are requiring brands to report on social and/or environmental performance, but mainly greenhouse gas emissions and reductions. All of this is to say, sustainability has gone mainstream, and if your company is not paying attention, you will lose competitive advantage and market share.
But, what if your company wants measure and improve its sustainability performance for altruistic reasons, or wants to someday be acquired, or even wants opportunities to sell to retailers like Wal-Mart, Target and REI, and you simply can’t afford to hire a Chief Sustainability Officer, or in-house sustainability professionals? That’s where Emerger Strategies comes in, but before we dive into how we can help your company mitigate risks, increase competitive advantage, attract & retain talent, enhance customer loyalty and improve financial performance, let’s first take a look at the roles and responsibilities of a Chief Sustainability Officer? According the the Harvard Business Review, there are eight critical tasks for CSOs, which can be found below:
Eight Critical Tasks for CSOs
1. Ensuring regulatory compliance. Anticipate regulatory trends and their implications. Establish adherence to the sustainability laws and regulations that apply to each industry, process, and type of business. Assess risk management. Enact internal policies.
2. Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) monitoring and reporting. Collect data and metrics following the reporting standards. Benchmark with industry peers. Prepare the completion and communications of company ESG report.
3. Overseeing the portfolio of sustainability projects. Act as a project management office: planning, coordinating, reviewing progress, and tracking results to coordinate various operational efforts.
4. Managing stakeholders’ relationships. Promote ongoing dialogue with internal and external stakeholders in order to develop constructive, transparent relationships.
5. Building organizational capabilities. Identify gaps and adopt appropriate educational initiatives for upskilling and/or sourcing the missing capabilities. Identify innovative ways to scale the new capabilities. Share and disseminate knowledge and best practices.
6. Fostering cultural change. Help define and communicate purpose to drive the transformation. Champion cultural change across the entire organization also through education. Promote mindset shifts based on concrete behaviors. Establish routines to reinforce the change, for a credible “walk the talk” from leaders.
7. Scouting and experimenting. Promote openness toward the external innovation ecosystem. Explore emerging sustainability technologies, solutions, and practices. Test the applicability and learn from experiments. Scale up adoption in the broader organization.
8. Embedding sustainability into processes and decision making. Revise key processes and related criteria/metrics/tools for decisions. Coach decision makers to manage complex trade-offs.
As you can see, a CSO certainly has their hands full managing the sustainability performance of a business, and your company may not be able to effectively measure and improve your social and environmental performance while you are busy putting out the everyday fires that arise from running a successful business. So, how do you meet the ever-increasing demand & pressure from investors, employees and customers for demonstrating that your company authentically cares about its sustainability performance? You have three options:
1. You could hire a Chief Sustainability Officer for $150K per year, or hire a Sustainability Manager for $128K per year.
2. You could outsource an entire Sustainability Team (CSO, Sustainability Manager, Sustainability Marketing & Communications) for a fraction of the above costs with Emerger Strategies.
3. Try to add these additional roles and responsibilities to an existing employee, who already has a full-time job that requires hir or her attention, which is not recommended.
Emerger Strategies acts as your company’s CSO, Sustainability Manager and Sustainability Marketing & Communications team. We accomplish all of the roles and responsibilities listed above through an annual Sustainability Assessment and taking steps to improve your Sustainability Assessment scores, which helps to embed sustainability, foster cultural change and drive innovation; we help your company mitigate risks, engage stakeholders and manage sustainability projects through our Strategic Sustainability Planning process; and effectively and transparently communicating your sustainability results through an annual Sustainability Report.
Simply put, our sustainability expertise saves our clients time and money. We offer a full range of Sustainability Consulting Services at a fraction of the cost when compared to hiring in-house sustainability professionals. Emerger Strategies is your outsourced sustainability team that delivers impactful results. Need proof? Check out our recently released Sustainable Business Case Study with our client, Rep Your Water.
However, we believe that what we are doing goes far beyond saving our clients time and money. We at Emerger Strategies simply want to help as many businesses as possible to measure and improve their sustainability performance. That’s why we created the free Simple Sustainability Assessment to help SMEs start their sustainability journey and point them in the right direction regarding what to measure. When compared to hiring in-house sustainability professionals, we provide our Sustainability Consulting Services at a fraction of the cost.
Why? Because it’s the right thing to do, and we believe in doing unto those downstream as we would have those upstream do unto us.